During the Game Developers Conference, Microsoft announced a new video game sharing feature for Xbox Live that will allow gamers to play and rate community developed games. They can also share theses games with any of their Xbox Live friends.

Microsoft believes that the new “open distribution” service will be a boon for community game development, allowing any level developers to almost instantly reach 10 million Xbox Live users. With the announcement of this new service, seven games created using XNA Game Studio 2.0 have already been announced…

Nokia’s new N-Gage service has been marred by several delays and, in December 2007, the company formally pushed the launch of the service to the first half of 2008. Now with a pre-launch version, N-Gage First Access, being made available to N81 users through the official N-Gage website, the full version can’t be far off. And just before the launch of the service, the ongoing Game Developers Conference proved to be a great platform for the cellphone maker to shed more light on N-Gage’s new avatar as a standard gaming service for Nokia cellphone which will allow users to download and…

Regardless of how you feel about most award ceremonies, you have to respect the Game Developers Choice Awards, in which actual working professionals (read: people who really know their stuff) pick the best and brightest games, ideas, and people of the past year. At this year’s eighth iteration of the ceremony, Valve’s innovative Portal was named the game of the year, with other big winners including Bioshock, Crackdown, Fl0w, Crysis, and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Also honored were Sid Meier with a lifetime achievement award, Jason Della Rocca with an ambassador award, and Ralph Baer with a pioneer award.

Click through for a full list of the winners.

Microsoft is gearing up to provide Xbox Live users around the globe with this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) coverage. Live users can stay abreast with the latest Xbox 360 related news, including the keynote by Xbox Live boss, John Schappert, from the comforts of their home – or wherever their 360 might be – as Microsoft will feed them with free downloadable high-definition footage, screenshots and demos.

Microsoft has sought to use Xbox Live as its promotional mouthpiece and the “Bringing it Home Campaign” during E3 2006 was the…